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LF small group tactics oriented dungeon running
As the title says, I'm looking for MMO focused on small group dungeons where tactics and group cooperation matter. It can be instanced PVE or not, but its important to have dungeons for all level ranges, decent lfg capabilities and player base to group with. Graphics do not matter much. If agro mechanics is replaced by positioning all the better.
WOW wasn't half bad before it got gradually dumbed down, now it's all about aoe tanking and just zooming through the instance to get the loot.
If you are going to suggest DDO, I tried that long time ago, didn't reach level cap, but the group dungeons I was in were basically zerging the mobs, not exactly what I was looking for.
Subscribtions: EVE, SWTOR WOW, WAR, DDO, VG, AOC, COV, FFXI, GW, RFO, Aion
+plenty of F2P, betas, trials
Female Dwarf player: WOW, VG, WAR, DDO
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Due to the recent economic crisis and spending cuts the light at the end of the tunnel was turned off. Sincerely, God.
Comments
So, nothing, no old or indie game I may have missed? Are all MMOs really about the idiotic questing or PVP based?
Subscribtions: EVE, SWTOR WOW, WAR, DDO, VG, AOC, COV, FFXI, GW, RFO, Aion
+plenty of F2P, betas, trials
Female Dwarf player: WOW, VG, WAR, DDO
.
Due to the recent economic crisis and spending cuts the light at the end of the tunnel was turned off. Sincerely, God.
Well I would say DDO is the only game that really matches and if you couldn't find any non-zerg groups then you are a bit stuck.
Personally I have never had a problem with zerging, it does exist no doubt about it, I just pick my groups carefully. In addition there are guilds that specialise in taking quests at a sensible rate, RP guilds that tend not to rush, or permadeath guilds who naturally have to be careful.
p.s. You can now have hire henchmen.
Guild Wars might be what you're looking for. Most of the content assumes that you're at the level cap, but you get there very quickly. Apart from pre-searing (the Prophecies campaign starting area), very brief tutorials in the other campaigns, and a handful of gimmicky side things that you can mostly skip, all content is designed for a group of 4-8 players. Each group gets its own instance everywhere except for towns where there is no combat.
Guild Wars doesn't use the standard aggro system. Rather, mobs go after whichever character in your group they think they can kill the fastest. They tend to favor attacking nearby targets over more distant ones, classes with lighter armor over those with heavier armor, and group members who are already damaged. You can "body block" mobs by getting in their way so that they can't go after someone else. That is, characters that are not allied with each other cannot run through each other.
Getting a group is also pretty easy. All players on American servers looking to do a particular mission are stick in the same outpost, rather than partitioned into dozens of separate servers where they can't group together. Thus, everyone looking to do the same mission as you is easy to find. If that's not enough, you can transfer to European English servers in a few clicks, or to various other language servers, though that may be inadviseable if you don't speak the language.
You can also fill in henchmen and heroes (AI characters) as party members. If you insist on having a full group of players only, that might be rather hard to do; and indeed, not allowed in the Nightfall campaign, where most missions require you to bring a hero). If you're content to get to six players or so and give up looking for some other particular class (say, healers) and add two heroes, it's pretty easy to get a group. You can also be the only player in your group and otherwise have only AI characters if so inclined, but that doesn't sound like what you're looking for.
Thanks for the lenthgy reply, thruth be told, I already tried GW a few years back. There was one extremely annoying thing that became the game breaker for me. NO JUMPING. I was trying, I struggled for a few hours, but when I kept pausing the game (or whatever that spacebar did, pausing online does not make sense, yet I recall I was doing that, is it possible in solo or am I confusing it with something else like nwn2 or something?) accidentaly all the time, after a while I gave up, uninstalled and never touched again. I do not have issues with no jumping in isometric point clickers, but GW has wasd, I don't know, it kinda has the impression and all markings of a game where it should be possible to jump, yet it is not.
I am not very familiar with the nature of the instanced content though, I am looking for dungeon running with traps, monsters, doors, boss fighs and the like, not sure whether the missions are like that or more just like simply group quests ( I hate and despise everything the mmo "quest" stands for ). Also I was under the impression the endgame was mostly about pvp? I will try do some research and maybe see if I can overcome the jumplessnes this time. Sigh... several years of playing CS, especially pre-jump nerf era and your thumb and spacebar develop a kind of relationship that is hard to break apart.
Subscribtions: EVE, SWTOR WOW, WAR, DDO, VG, AOC, COV, FFXI, GW, RFO, Aion
+plenty of F2P, betas, trials
Female Dwarf player: WOW, VG, WAR, DDO
.
Due to the recent economic crisis and spending cuts the light at the end of the tunnel was turned off. Sincerely, God.
If you played Guild Wars a few years ago, that was most likely back when it didn't have an endgame. In April 2007, they added hard mode, which is basically the endgame. And it's quite a rarity among MMORPGs, too: an endgame that isn't completely stupid.
Anyway, the way that hard mode works is after you've beaten a campaign, you can select hard mode for that campaign. That increases the level of all of the mobs; for content already designed to assume you were at the level cap, this is usually only by 2 levels, but for lower level content, it makes it suitable for the level cap. Hard mode also makes mobs run faster, cast faster, and have skills recharge faster, so it's a lot more challenge tha easy mode. You can switch between easy mode and hard mode in any town or outpost, and virtually everywhere in the game can have the difficulty raised via hard mode, with pre-searing the only exception that comes to mind.
I'm not sure that I understand what you mean by a dungeon as opposed to a quest. I guess I could explain the difference between missions and quests in Guild Wars. A quest sends you into an explorable area asking you to go kill this boss, kill 10 of these mobs, go explore this area, or whatever. There can be several quests done in the same explorable area, and sometimes some of them are prerequisites for others. A quest may well only lead you to a small fraction of the explorable area. The explorable area is instanced for your party alone, and no other players can see you in the explorable area. Quests give experience and gold as rewards, and usually cannot be repeated.
A mission, on the other hand, is an instance with one goal and one only: beat the mission. That can mean a variety of things, such as killing particular bosses or getting to the ending area alive. Well, that's it's not quite true that the missions have only one goal. Prophecies missions also have a bonus, such as killing an extra boss, but the bonus is optional. Factions and Nightfall missions give you different levels of rewards depending on what you did in the mission. Most Nightfall mission reward levels are kind of like the Prophecies bonuses. Some Nightfall missions and most Factions missions rate you by how fast you beat the mission. Anyway, everything that spawns in a mission is designed for that particular mission, and you'll have to traverse most of the map to do the mission.
There are a wide variety of game mechanics involved with various missions, to the degree that for most missions, it's possible to give a description of the game mechanics that would uniquely identify the mission to a veteran player of the game without having to say anything about mobs, geography, or anything of that sort. For example, the unique mission where you have to kill groups of mobs that respawn every two minutes if you haven't killed their priest is Thirsty River. The unique mission where you can pick two allies to bring, each of which lets you skip a particular portion is Raisu Palace. The unique mission where there are traps that do area damage to your group every 5 seconds and you get a special skill to disable them is Venta Cemetary. The gameplay variety of the missions of Guild Wars is considerably greater than, say, the instances in WoW.
A mission gives you gold and experience the first time you beat it in easy mode, and then also the first time you beat it in hard mode. Beating a mission often drops you off in an area you hadn't been to yet, to move along through the game world. Missions invariably advance the storyline, and have associated cutscene cinematics, which are videos that play to explain the storyline. You can skip the cinematics if you like. Missions have an average of a little over two cutscenes each. Missions can be repeated as many times as you like.
In Prophecies, you can skip nearly everything, and only have to do a few of the missions to advance. In Factions and Nightfall, you can skip most of the quests, but have to do a handful of primary quests that mostly take you to the next mission location. In Factions and Nightfall, you have to do nearly all of the missions to advance.
Couldn´t agree more, try to forget that you can´t jump and just play it, you won´t find a better small group tactics game, i have played gw for more than 2000 hours and never get bored.
There isn't much to add here that hasn't already been said. DDO is the obvious fit. GW, while good, was never as interesting to me.
The real trick to DDO is to bring a friend or five. If you're depending on PUG's then you're going to end up with a bunch of players who have already visited the dungeon 500 times. For those people a zerg is a lot of fun, but for a first time through, slow and careful is one of the best MMOG exeriences you'll ever have.
just wanted to throw this out there, EQ1 has arguably the MOST content of any mmorpg with literrly 100's of dungeons.
On top of that, many of those dungeons are massive, taking hours and hours to explore. I recently went back to EQ1 after nearly a 5 year break, and while its definitely different than current mmo's it has the dungeon crawls I have missed.
Add to that fact that you never have to run the same dungeon twice in your level range if you dont want to (other than for items and what not) make it exceptional.
Literally are 10+ dungeons I can do at my level range right now.
10+ dungeons for one level?! Blasphemy!! ..I will have to give this a try.
As others have stated though GW is awesome.
Prophicies offers the most freedom. You can actually run through the zones without fighting any monsters either, or pay a "runner" to do it for you ROFLS. You only have a few missions which are mandatory, and the hardmode is difficulty wise endgame yes..quite fun. It would be best to have 3+ real life friends to play this game with, or join a guild. Since it's possible to solo all 3 campaigns some people do that but it can cause you to miss out on an experience.
It's definately worth it to wait until you find somebody you really click with to play through regardless of what campaign your on. If you find that right person that you can play through the whole game with them..if you find a "special" someone..well this can be pretty romantic at times for an mmorpg XD
I'm usually anti-social online besides the game but you can meet some special people in GWars.
DDO and GW are two but you said you played them, EQ1 was lots of groups and going through places not really any quests if i remember right?
City of Heroes can be done entirly from groups but it can be a rush through of places depending on the group.
Final Fantasy is supose to be all about groups but not sure how tactical it is or much about it since i never played it much.
Well FFXI is actually the ONLY game truly designed properly as a MMORPG and as a grouping game,witch should be the purpose of playing an MMORPG.
In saying that i would be lying if i did not say that the game rubs a lot of people the wrong way.Some people have ridiculous reasons,some have lazy reasons ,some have legit reasons,some just can't let go of their WOW or their old game.The great big picture of FFXI is really over whelming,you realistically cannot completely finish the game in under 5 years and that would be a ton of gaming.It has a lot of content outside of your normal,so there is ALWAYS something to do,albeit like anything it can get boring after awhile.
The best thing FFXI offers is it's complete combat system.It has skill points,elemental aspects,controlled combat,renkai system,magic bursts,weapon skills,teamwork,a sub class system that makes everything in combat flexible.FFXI has ONLY ONE mount and that you must raise from an egg,and how yo uraise it,will determine the CHOCOBO's attributes.FFXI is heavy on the mathematical equations ,when comes to combat,nothing is too simplistic.You can really never break the game,even when you are much higher in level,some mobs can still be quite formidable.
FFXI has a lot of dungeons/caves where by you could realistically go through every level in a dungeon,but it is not your best option at all times.
The tough part is realizing that most older games now have the majority of their population stagnant,or doing solo things or hanging with their friends,so it can be quite lonely in these older games.EQ2 is sort of like FFXi,it is the game that started all the MMORPG madness,but like FFXi is an older game.Vanguard is a great looking game ,and full of content but has a low popualtion,and again i did not find i had to group all the time,other than tough quests.NONE of these games are PVP based ,but EQ2 is sort of about the questing,but the elite quests are real good ,but very hard also.
I am in the same boat,i think playing an MMORPG to PVP is a ridiculous idea,that is why finding a good grouping game is VERY tough,i am always on the lookout.The last year or so,there has been a ton of developers liscensing the UE3 engine,so wit hthat and al lthe other engines out there,should be quite a few MMORPG's coming out,we are bound to see some new ideas,and not all about PVP.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
For something very different, you could try taking a look at Mabinogi. Nearly all leveling in Mabinogi is conducted by runs through its instanced dungeons, most of which are soloable if you really know what you're doing. Groups of people who know what they're doing, however, make it considerably safer and easier. (Groups of people who have no idea what they're doing have the opposite effect though).
For tactics, Mabinogi emphasizes not getting hit in the first place. While it doesn't have the same huge set of skills you'll find in other games, it does place more emphasis on guessing what attack your opponent decides to use next and responding appropriately than I have seen in any other MMO. Just auto attacking won't let you kill anything more dangerous than a racoon in the game.